Classification of Benign and Malignant Renal Tumors Based on CT Scans and Clinical Data Using Machine Learning Methods

Abstract

Up to 20% of renal masses ≤4 cm is found to be benign at the time of surgical excision, raising concern for overtreatment. However, the risk of malignancy is currently unable to be accurately predicted prior to surgery using imaging alone. The objective of this study is to propose a machine learning (ML) framework for pre-operative renal tumor classification using readily available clinical and CT imaging data. We tested both traditional ML methods (i.e., XGBoost, random forest (RF)) and deep learning (DL) methods (i.e., multilayer perceptron (MLP), 3D convolutional neural network (3DCNN)) to build the classification model. We discovered that the combination of clinical and radiomics features produced the best results (i.e., AUC [95% CI] of 0.719 [0.712–0.726], a precision [95% CI] of 0.976 [0.975–0.978], a recall [95% CI] of 0.683 [0.675–0.691], and a specificity [95% CI] of 0.827 [0.817–0.837]). Our analysis revealed that employing ML models with CT scans and clinical data holds promise for classifying the risk of renal malignancy. Future work should focus on externally validating the proposed model and features to better support clinical decision-making in renal cancer diagnosis.